From the European South

a transdisciplinary journal of postcolonial humanities

Decolonizzare gli archivi del Mediterraneo, interrogare l'Europa

Floriana Bernardi su La questione mediterranea di Iain Chambers e Marta Cariello

Abstract

La questione mediterranea addresses the urgent call to interpret and take sides with the unexpected centrality of the Mediterranean Sea in contemporary news, especially concerning issues of migrations and conflicts. Offering a cutting-edge contribution to cultural and postcolonial studies, this book by Iain Chambers and Marta Cariello suggests a paradigmatic shift in the study of the Mediterranean as a critical ‘time-space’ for modern history and culture, using mainly African and Asian musical, cinematic, and poetical sources, intertwined with well-known European mainstream ones. The result is a pervasive critical approach to research grounded on the need to decolonialize European studies and re-balance the power asymmetry between the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Southern’ and ‘Western’ and ‘Northern’ shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This reasoning on ‘the Mediterranean to come’ also questions the core of European policies and knowledge/power production, suggesting a movement towards and along new routes, different from those traced by nationalism, colonialism, and racism, which are now frighteningly resurfacing in the old continent.

Keywords

decolonisation, Mediterranean archives, arts, re-mapping, questioning Europe

Pages

119-122

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